Incompetence and Intelligence Disarray

With approval polls hovering in the thirties, the weakened Bush administration is now forced to admit some errors of judgment, although not all (see Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.) Porter Goss was forced out as head of the CIA after a disastrous reign that has seen one of the prime US assets fighting terrorism lose major parts of its experienced staff, seen morale drop with the remaining staff, seen cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies curtailed, and seen turf battles unresolved in the intelligence community. The grossly incompetent administration is incapable of strategic, tactical, or management thinking and planning, and contrary to its public claims, is unable to fight terrorism effectively.

George Tenet was replaced, not because of pre 9/11 intelligence failures but because Bush believed that the CIA was politically opposed to his ideas. He brought in a Congressman with no managerial experience who set out to make the CIA politically responsive to administration desires. Goss flooded CIA senior positions with aides from his Congressional office, including the soon to be notorious Dusty Foggo who is rumored to be involved in the Duke Cunningham scandal. Transformation of an organization is inherently difficult but the way to do it is to involve those being transformed. Goss and his political appointees preferred to ignore staff, hoping they would leave and his wishes were achieved.

Dana Priest in today’s Washington Post provides disturbing commentary on what Goss did in his term:

Goss, then the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, was handpicked by the White House to purge what some in the administration viewed as a cabal of wily spies working to oppose administration policy in Iraq.

Goss's counterinsurgency campaign was so crudely executed by his top lieutenants, some of them former congressional staffers, that they drove out senior and mid-level civil servants who were unwilling to accept the accusation that their actions were politically motivated, some intelligence officers and outside experts said.

Four former deputy directors of operations once tried to offer Goss advice about changing the clandestine service without setting off a rebellion, but Goss declined to speak to any of them, said former CIA officials who are aware of the communications. The perception that Goss was conducting a partisan witch hunt grew, too, as staffers asked about the party affiliation of officers who sent in cables or analyses on Iraq that contradicted the Defense Department's more optimistic scenarios. Pre-retirement classes, which serve as a transition out of the agency for active-duty officers, are bulging with agency employees.

Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.

"Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers," John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July said. "Turf battles continue" with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community "because there's a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA's future." Brennan added: "Porter's a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job."

As important, Goss -- who did not like to travel overseas or to wine and dine foreign intelligence chiefs who visited Washington -- allowed the atrophy of relations with the foreign intelligence services that helped the CIA kill or catch nearly all the terrorists taken off the streets since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, in the view of these officials and several foreign intelligence officials. One senior European counterterrorism official, asked recently for his assessment of Goss's leadership, responded by saying, "Who?"

Less than two months after Goss took over, the much-respected deputy director of operations, Stephen R. Kappes, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, resigned in protest over a demand by Goss's chief of staff, Patrick Murray, that Kappes fire Sulick for criticizing Murray. Kappes "was the guy who a generation of us wanted to see as the DDO [operations chief]. Kappes's leaving was a painful thing," Gary Berntsen, a former operations officer and self-described Republican and Bush supporter who retired in June 2005 said. "It made it difficult for [Goss] within the clandestine service. Unfortunately, this is something that dogged him during his tenure." Many agency officials felt the aides showed disdain for officers who had spent their careers in public service.

While the stature and role of the CIA were greatly diminished under Goss during the congressionally ordered reorganization of the intelligence agencies, his counterpart at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, continued his aggressive efforts to develop a clandestine intelligence operation within his department. The Pentagon's human intelligence unit and its other clandestine military units are expanding in number and authority. Rumsfeld recently won the ability to sidestep U.S. ambassadors in certain circumstances when the Pentagon wants to send in clandestine teams to collect intelligence or undertake operations.

Now, "the real battle lies between" Negroponte and Rumsfeld, said retired Army Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, a former deputy national security adviser and once a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. "Rumsfeld rules the roost now."